The secret is love. We make everything by hand, so we
blend it all together raw. The recipe is on our website, but everything
is hand-processed. We hand-peel our garlic—fresh garlic is very
important—as well as the fresh ginger. Those are the predominant flavors
in the sauce. If you compare our daily sauce with our bottled sauce,
it’ll be a different color, even though they have the same elements,
because during our bottling production we have to pasteurize it for the
USDA.

How did you develop the recipe?

The recipe was developed as a very traditional sauce.
Nong’s mother used to make it. It’s a very well-balanced sauce: a touch
of sour and sweet, salts, bitter. It’s a very complex sauce, very
universal. It goes very well with chicken or white fish, any neutral
protein because it’s so strong and the sauce cuts right through.

What’s it good for?

The daily sauce we do is raw and isn’t the best for
marinades. The cooked one is the best for marinades—proteins, definitely
fatty proteins, caramelized; it goes on the grill very well. It’s
wonderful for vegetable stir fry. Just glaze it right at the end, it
gives it a wonderful balance because of all of the aromatics in the
sauce.

I get as many local products as I can. I get carrots from
DeNoble Farms in Tillamook. I have a farmer who grows the habaneros at
Rick Steffen Farms [in Silverton]. I get a curry blend from Stone
Cottage, and I use white balsamic vinegar from Italy. That’s a pretty
unique ingredient. We have a commercial kitchen that’s over by OMSI,
where I take everything and roast it for four to five hours for each
batch. Then I blend it all up and bottle it!

How did you develop the recipe?

I was just trying to make hot sauce with things that I
grew at first, but then I don’t grow everything anymore because I make
it on a bigger scale. But that’s where the recipe started, just from
growing things and trying to make sauces without any kind of weird
ingredients. A lot of hot sauces have gums in them, or other
preservatives, so I just make it with just the vegetables and spices.

What’s it good for?

Well, we have recipes on our website, but my favorite
thing to do with the habanero sauce is to use it as either a meat
marinade or a pizza sauce. It’s pretty spicy, but that’s why I like it.
Or you can just use it as a regular hot sauce and add it to any food.

The standard base of the sauce is fish sauce, lime juice,
chilies, cherry tomatoes and sugar. We use different kinds of food
processors to get everything blended and married together. It actually
is a mother sauce that you can do all kinds of different things with.
You can make a Southeast Asian salsa with it, you can make a shredded
cucumber salad or a mango salad and add a little kick with some
cilantro.

How did you develop the recipe?

Sok Sab Bai chef Nyno Thol actually developed the recipe.
It’s a Southeast Asian traditional sauce that everyone uses, but he got
tired of always having to make it and so many people requesting bottles.
He would make it at home barbecues, and people would always say, “Make
da sauce! Make da sauce!” That’s how it got its name. Nyno just decided
to finally get it into a bottle and get it going. It’s been going for
about five years now.

What’s it good for?

It’s really great with any protein, especially oysters,
like grilled oysters on the half shell. Or with steak it’s really good.
Just any protein in general. We even have some customers who send us
different recipes that they personally do. They’ve said they’ve made a
spicy macaroni-and-cheese recipe, spicy popcorn, pizza…they pretty much
use it on anything.

With local, organic quince and a local, raw, wildflower
honey that comes from our beekeepers on the way to Mount Hood. The
ingredients are really simple: fresh rosemary and rosemary oil and
organic lemon juice. We shred the quince, and we leave the skins on, and
then we boil them up with the honey and the lemon and just let them
sit. They take a long time. It takes about three hours to get that nice,
deep color.

How did you develop the recipe?

It’s a pretty fun product because it’s the first that I’m
aware of that is a spreadable membrillo [quince paste]. I go to dinner
parties all the time, and I get so annoyed because the quince paste
always breaks the crackers. That’s how it came about. I thought there
should be a spreadable and shelf-stable membrillo. Most of the time, you
can only find quince paste in the refrigerated section.

What’s it good for?

I watched someone eat it with a spoon out of the jar like
it was applesauce. That was a little extreme. I don’t recommend that,
but it happens. It was created to take the place of membrillo, with
manchego on the cheese board. It’s pretty flexible because it has a
really nice, floral note—that’s what the quince does. Then it kind of
ends with a slightly herbaceous note with the rosemary.

Our salt is all hand-harvested from Netarts Bay on the Oregon
Coast. We boil the
water at really high temperatures to remove the calcium and magnesium
that can give sea salts a bitter taste. At that stage, we add Grochau
Cellars [pinot noir] to the brine. Then the mixture is transferred to
our custom-made evaporation pan, and then the salt is harvested from
there. The main thing is that the pinot noir is added to the ocean
brine, and the salt crystals form with it.

How did you develop the recipe?

It came about because Ben Jacobsen, the proprietor, is
friends with John Grochau, who is the proprietor of Grochau Cellars and
vineyards. They’re located not too far from us and the two of them have
been friends for a while and used to race bikes together. In the early
days they just wanted to do something together with their two companies.

What’s it good for?

The pinot noir salt is great with anything you would drink
a glass of pinot with. So it’s great with some Northwest classic
salmon, any kind of fish or steak. We like to use it in desserts, as
well. The flavors in it pair really well with chocolate and caramel. It
has notes of earth and raspberry. It’s really pretty, because of the
colors, so people use it a lot on cupcakes and ice cream because it has a
really striking color.

Alma Chocolate, Lavender Caramel Sauce

AVAILABLE AT: Alma Chocolate, Cacao.MAKER: Sarah Hart.

How do you make it?

It’s a pretty straightforward butter-and-cream caramel.
What gives it so much flavor is we caramelize turbinado sugar, which has
a little bit more molasses than regular sugar. So we caramelize the
turbinado sugar, infuse the cream with lavender buds that we get from
our neighbor at the farmers market, Sundance Lavender Farm. So we do an
infusion of the cream, the lavender, while the sugar is caramelizing,
and then it all goes together and it’s delicious.

How did you develop the recipe?

It’s a riff on a basic caramel recipe I had when I was
doing confectionery training. The infusion was my idea as a way to
change it up and make it more interesting. I think I just started
playing around with the recipe and trying to figure out how to do
something that we could use in drinks at the shop. We just started
playing around with adding more cream, and it was really good! The whole
thing was a trial-and-error process.

What’s it good for?

All of the sauces are really good if you heat them up.
They’re just delicious on ice cream. The lavender one is good on a fruit
crumble and good just dipping fruit in, especially pears. There’s
something about the floral notes of the pears and lavender that are so
amazing together. I’ve had friends use it as a glaze on ham and lamb.
The lavender and the lamb create a sort of a Provence taste. I also have
people that just eat it with a spoon out of the jar.

NOTE: This article has been corrected from the Market Guide's print version to more accurately describe the process by which Jacobsen salt is made. "Hand-carved" has been changed to "hand-harvested." Willamette Week regrets the error.